Kyle Soller, The Inheritance
As Eric Glass, Soller’s sensitively nuanced performance is one of the most crucial in The Inheritance, the development of his humanity and the lightness of his humour goes a long way to sustaining the considerable heft of this two-part epic.

Honourable mention: Hans Kesting, OedipusA real birthday treat this was, Kesting giving us Sophocles via Icke, effortlessly redefining tragic Greek figures for the contemporary age. Entirely capturing the modern politician’s dilemma about how ‘real’ to be, his dogged pursuit of the truth was as compelling as it has ever been.

Steven Miller, Sunshine on Leith
Musical theatre is so often derided as frothy flights of fancy that it can be easy to be surprised when a performance of real honesty shines through. Miller’s Davy, a bluff squaddie struggling to readjust to life after a tour in the Middle East, captured so much of that magical ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’ quality from his dancing to his singing, as well as his acting, that I could hardly take my eyes off him.

Honourable mention: Andrew Finnigan, DripI’m not picking Finnigan because he picked me to be his audience hunk (honest) but for the irresistible charm of his effortlessly guileless Liam, the kind of hero you can’t help but root for and exactly the kind of (incidentally) gay characters we need our culture to be suffused with.

A striking new musical at the Union Theatre based on Elchin’s Citizens of Hell, Midnight is enthralling, entertaining and exciting

“If these walls could talk, well they’d probably just scream”

We all like to think that we would be part of the resistance if we were living under a repressive regime but the truth is, that kind of pressure is unimaginable unless that suffocating terror is a part of every waking moment, where life or death decisions mean exactly that. This is the milieu that Midnight exists in – Soviet Azerbaijan as 1937 draws to a close – where every knock on the door brings with it the threat of the secret police.

Based on Elchin’s play Citizens of Hell, Laurence Mark Wythe (music and lyrics) and Timothy Knapman’s (book and lyrics) musical adaptation is so very good at translating the eerie strangeness of this world and is a supremely confident new musical to boot. Essentially a three-handed psychological thriller, Kate Golledge’s production is superbly enhanced by the use of a ghostly actor-musician ensemble who complement and complicate the existence that our central couple have set up for themselves. Continue reading “Review: Midnight, Union Theatre”